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Ahead of Saturday’s sold-out 7 pm Asbury Park Dance Festival at The House of Independents, organizers will host a free preview at 6:30 and 7 pm at the Carousel Building, located on Asbury Avenue at Ocean Avenue.

As reported in triCity News [Sept 5 edition] three dancers from the renowned Paul Taylor Dance Company are behind the Asbury Park Dance Festival. They include Michael Trusnovec, Laura Halzack, and Michelle Fleet, who received a nod for their work in the New York Times. 

“Months before his final performance with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, at the end of June — after two decades in the company — Michael Trusnovec, 44, was cramming his schedule with projects,” The Times wrote. “Idleness is not in his nature. The biggest of these is a new festival he is starting up with two of his former Taylor colleagues, Laura Halzack and Michelle Fleet, and his husband, V.J. Carbone, a film publicist. The Asbury Park Dance Festival will have its debut on Sept. 14, with dancers from the Paul Taylor, Martha Graham and Doug Varone companies, as well as the tapper Caleb Teicher.

“I don’t think I’ve had a minute to contemplate the implications and the weight of leaving the company yet,” Trusnovec told the New York paper. “ It’s all about the art of distraction and deflection. Literally the morning after my final performance I flew to the American Dance Festival to finish staging Paul Taylor’s ‘Esplanade.’ It wound up being the perfect thing for me to do at that moment — “Esplanade” was the first Taylor dance I ever learned.

“We started planning the festival about 10 months ago,” he said. “Asbury Park has changed so rapidly; there’s a lot of art, a lot of music. We have a great community of friends there, a lot of arts’ people. People in the dance community were really enthusiastic. We’re doing it to support a local arts organization, ArtsED New Jersey.”

VJ Carbone, Trusnovec’s husband and independent film industry veteran behind the Asbury Park Film Initiative with restaurateur Marlyn Schlossbach, is the fourth founding member. 

The Asbury Park Dance Festival brings world-renowned companies, choreographers and dancers from the stages of Lincoln Center, Broadway, the Kennedy Center, Paris Opera, the Met and beyond together on the House of Independents stage.

The program features: 

• Members of the over 60-year-old Paul Taylor Dance Company will perform two duets created by Princess Grace Award-winning choreographer Bryan Arias.
• Award-winning choreographer Pam Tanowitz arranges repertory excerpts featuring Melissa Toogood, Michelle Fleet, and Michael Trusnovec.
• So You Think You Can Dance Season 11 Winner Ricky Ubeda, who will be appearing in the upcoming Steven Spielberg film and Broadway adaptation of West Side Story. 
• Martha Graham Dance Company principal guest artist and former principal dancer Blakeley White-McGuire and current soloist Lorenzo Pagano in an iconic Graham duet.
• Eleven-time Bessie Award-winning choreographer of dance, theater, opera and film Doug Varone.
• Bessie Award-winning tap dance/choreographer Caleb Teicher, touted as “Best of Dance” 2018 by the NY Times.
• And members of Axelrod Contemporary Ballet.

For more information, visit apdancefest.org.

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The Asbury Park Sun is affiliated with the triCityNews newspaper.

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